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Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

Menlo Park, CA - At an event held today in the garage where the company was founded, Google announced that they quietly rolled out the biggest update to their search algorithm in years. The new update is being called Hummingbird, sticking with the theme of naming their updates after animals (e.g. - Panda and Penguin).

The news comes as no surprise. Search marketers have been speculating that something changed in late August (August 21-22 is the most common guess), and some had even coined the change as "Google Phantom," a nod to the fact that something had happened, but nothing official had been announced.

Dips in traffic are customary after such an event, and there is a good chance that some sites could see substantial dips, especially if those sites are using spammy tactics to game the system. Even the strongest, above-board sites will probably experience what I call "the wobble effect." When a big change occurs it generally throws all of the search results out of whack when it first hits. Sites you've never seen before are suddenly on the first page and some long-standing sites seem to vanish. Over the next few weeks, though, the solid sites that aren't now being penalized will gradually rise back up to their original standing. They don't fall, they just wobble. (And as any fan of science can tell you, a wobble can turn a desert into an oasis).

But, like I said in my previous post today, every time a change like this occurs there is an upside. If this update goes further to lessen the positive impact of linking schemes, fake reviews, and spun content than those of us who follow "ethical SEO" tactics can only benefit.

And then there is the less obvious benefit: it just might be okay to have less traffic, as long as you get more relevant traffic. So much of the traffic we all receive has no value. We sometimes take over sites from other providers and discover that a huge portion of their traffic is from STUMBLEUPON. This is okay for a blogger, but is there really a single person on this planet who picks a lawyer because they stumbled upon their site? I hope not.

If we think about what Google's goal is, then we should welcome the changes. The only traffic our clients really want are the visitors who are looking for a lawyer or are doing research on the law because they don't yet realize they need a lawyer. Our job has always been to make sure that our clients sites look like a resource to the search engines for people with just those needs.

According to Amit Singhal, Google VP, Hummingbird is primarily aimed at giving Google’s search engine a better grasp at understanding concepts instead of mere words. "The change needed to be done because people have become so reliant on Google that they now routinely enter lengthy questions into the search box instead of just a few words related to specific topics."

It is too soon to say what changes will need to be made, if any, to existing sites to get them in line with the new algorithm, but rest assured that we will make whatever adjustments are necessary to make the most of this update.

Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

As widely reported last week, regulators in New York state have begun to crack down on businesses that post fake reviews to boost their own or their client’s businesses. Businesses that provide these fake reviews, many of which are SEO companies, have been the primary target of this first wave of crackdowns, but no one should think the investigations will end here.

“What we’ve found is even worse than old-fashioned false advertising,” said Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. “When you look at a billboard, you can tell it’s a paid advertisement — but on Yelp or Citysearch, you assume you’re reading authentic consumer opinions, making this practice even more deceiving.”

Another point that has been reiterated over and over is that while it might be annoying to be fooled by a fake review for a restaurant, it is potentially much more costly to believe the glowing report for the more professional services. As the New York Times put it, “the investigation uncovered a wide range of services buying fake reviews that could do more permanent damage: dentists, lawyers, even an ultrasound clinic.”

At Omnipresent we have never provided fake reviews for our clients. In times where we’ve noticed clients who have fake reviews from previous marketing efforts we have always advised you have them removed. Beyond the obvious ethics issues, to put it bluntly you are risking your entire practice if you take part in a fake review scheme. In California, and presumably most states, the Bar Association takes a very clear stand against its members participating in any advertising that is misleading. Fake reviews seems to clearly fall in that category.

The Silver Lining

Here is the good news: as states, bar associations and presumably review sites start cracking down on “the cheaters” those of us who have stayed honest with our reviews can only benefit. Reviews are still one of the most powerful tools on the internet, and you should certainly encourage your clients to leave them for you if offered (preferably on Yelp or Google).

The bottom line: never pay anyone for reviews, never offer anything for reviews, and never ever hire a company to provide you with reviews from people you never provided services. The short term gain is not worth the long term pain.

Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

For law firm websites, competition can be frustrating. Your competitors might already have a leg up on you in terms of content marketing, where people looking for advice could read an informative post – and then pick up the phone.

Whether or not this is the case, the opportunity is there. You can obtain more business through SEO, social media, and other outlets. And it all starts with content marketing.

In a recent look at content marketing tips from Sarah Schager, her team offers some insightful tips that can help your law firm take advantage of content marketing:

Consistency: Aim to produce content that is relevant and valuable. This creates loyalty, a brand voice, and puts you in a position as an expert.

Use Media that is Shareable: Infographics and videos are perfect for sharing via social media. This tip from Erin Pritchard relates the value of media – where it can merge with the content to provide value.

It Should be Data-Driven: What are your prospective clients searching for? What location(s) are relevant to searchers? This data can help your law firm find the appropriate key words.

Use a Content Calendar: Find a posting schedule that works for your law firm. This type of tool can help you keep everything ordered and make changes as needed, such as not having similar posts too close together.

These and other presented tips can easily carry over to a law firm blog, as seen in the previous selection. With these strategies, your firm can reach prospective clients that are searching for the right content – or ultimately, the right legal counsel.

Contact us to learn more about SEO, social media, and online marketing techniques that can get your law firm to the top!

Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

Legal marketing has changed over the years. With the rise of social media, law firms now seek the attention of clients via tweets, videos, blogposts, and other online content.

As an attorney, you may already have a Facebook or Twitter account. Perhaps you use them to connect with friends and family. However, social media offers more.

By building social networks, you can attract new clients, keep your knowledge up to date, and connect with peers. Leading lawyers use social media to remain relevant as well as to market to other people who chose to remain relevant.

Social media marketing offers advantages such as:

Cost. According to a 2009 Bloomberg post, corporate lawyers’ use of social networking is growing. Some are even using LinkedIn to connect with other professionals around the world. And all it cost them is the time it takes to set up a free profile and start networking.

Access. Online marketing means reaching a wider audience with your message – right now. No more waiting for ad development, printing, and publication. You can build a following with your blog, discuss helpful topics with colleagues via LinkedIn, pinpoint where ideal clients hang out online, and monitor your brand and reputation through feedback and review sites.

Networking. This is what social media is all about. Building online relationships with potential clients, peers and colleagues, and people of influence allows you to promote yourself and your practice. In so doing, you can share your legal expertise and gain credibility. Recognition in your field may lead to other opportunities such as speaking engagements, consulting requests, and more.

And if all this isn’t enough, there are specialty social media websites designed just for lawyers, such as LegalOnRamp.com.

Putting social media to good use is a matter of taking the time and making the effort. For some good tips on how to get started, check out this 2010 Mashablepost, “How Lawyers Are Using Social Media for Real Results.”

For more information on social media, social networking, website design, and other internet marketing services for lawyers, contact us. We’re here to help.

Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

A law firm's website is perhaps it's most crucial advertisement, and a new study by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell identifies the specific features that are most likely to convert visits to inquiries.

LexisNexis commissioned uLab | Participatory Design Associates to conduct the "2013 Law Firm Website Conversion Study" which evaluated consumers' opinions about law firm websites. Study participants were asked to recall a time when they needed to hire an attorney. Then, they reviewed several law firm websites and talked about their initial reactions and feelings about each one. Researchers compiled their comments as part of the study.

So why is this information important as you think about your law firm's website?

Sites that include the features consumers prefer are more likely to convert a exploratory visit to an email or phone call. In other words, if a potential clients responds favorably to your firm's website, he or she is more likely to seek additional information about your services.

Let us help you develop a well-designed website that elicits a response from your potential clients. Contact us today to learn more about our services for law firms.

Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

Working with attorneys over the past 7 years has taught me something. Not very many want to try anything new until it's been proven...and then it's too late. When I first started working with law firms a simple website with decent title and meta tags would provide an unbelievable ROI. Attorneys were tentative about building websites. Some didn't think they needed it because they got all of their clients from referrals. Others didn't trust the internet and some "old school" attorneys didn't feel comfortable "advertising" online. By the way, talk to Blockbuster about waiting too long to jump on the internet train. Oh wait, they were bankrupted by companies like Netflix.

Now here we are, 7 years later and almost every law firm has a website. The number of potential clients hasn't increased exponentially but the number of attorneys online has. So, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you stay one step ahead of your competitors? The answer...be an early adopter. You don't need to jump on every band wagon but when Facebook has almost a billion users and Google puts out a new product, you should check it out.

Will you get any clients from Facebook? Probably not. At least not this year but you never know what Facebook will turn into. They are already working with Bing to include Facebook entries into their results page. The age old adage "you get out of it what you put in" really applies here. Setting up a Facebook page and letting it sit there does you no good. This isn't traditional marketing. You're not buying an ad in the YellowPages. That page should be used to push out information about your firm or showcase your knowledge in your field. I say this to all of my clients, you need to give in order to receive when it comes to the internet (take this blog for example).

Google + will probably have a better impact in the near future on your online marketing. It allows you to customize your page and use the status section as an external blog. You can also tie your Google local account into your + page. Make sure to do your research before setting up your page. You want to maximize the effort you spend on your social media so make sure you're doing it correctly. Look at other accounts that perform well and research what they are doing.

Of course, you can always wait until these new resources reach maturity but by then it will be too late.

Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

Google Penguin is an algorithm update that was initiated back in April. The main focus of the update was to discredit "bad" links to sites. So, if you were participating in building links to your site (yourself or through your SEO company) you may have been negatively affected. Some sites lost major ranking and big offenders may have been blacklisted.

The update was suppose to strip credit for bad links but not affect good sites that may have had some of those same links. The theory behind that is to eliminate people from buying these worthless links and pointing them at their competitors sites. There is still some debate on whether sites can be negatively damaged by these bad links or if they are just no longer getting credit for them.

Google Penguin has prompted some attorneys to look into more credible SEO companies for their optimization. Just like a day trader that gets bit by a couple bad stock purchases, an event like this can expose that fact that you may be better off practicing law than optimizing your own website.

Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

"If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site,
don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action
on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more
transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual
links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential
spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For
example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked
links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the
message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily
something that you automatically need to worry about.

If we've taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice
a drop in search traffic, which you can see in the “Search queries”
feature Webmaster Tools for example. As always, if you believe you have
been affected by a manual spam action and your site no longer violates
the Webmaster Guidelines, go ahead and file a reconsideration request.
It’ll take some time for us to process the request, but you will receive
a followup message confirming when we’ve processed it.

Update: Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on this change.
An engineer worked over the weekend based on the suggestions here, and
starting on Sunday we made two changes so you can tell the "individual
links aren't trusted" messages from the "our opinion of your entire site
is affected" messages.

First off, we changed the messages themselves that we'll send out to
make it clear that for a specific incident "we are taking very targeted
action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole." So
anyone that gets a message going forward can tell what type of action
has occurred.

The second change is that these messages won't show the yellow caution sign in our webmaster console at http://google.com/webmasters/ like
our other webspam notifications. This reflects the fact that these
actions are much more targeted and don't always require action by the
site owner.

Thanks again for the feedback, and we'll continue to work on ways to
provide more useful and actionable information for site owners."

If this post by Mr. Cutts makes sense to you then you are doing more SEO work than legal work. This post is meant for those who were "damaged" by Google Penguin. Google Penguin was released to strip away the benefit that some law firms were getting from buying links. This has been a common practice for quite some time but Google finally decided to put its foot down. Law firms who may have gotten away with this practice for months or even years are now paying the price.

If you are an attorney reading this, the best piece of advice I can give you is to not try to trick the system but to work within it. That means, provide information on your website (and other online profiles) that will be helpful to the legal community in general. You can fool some people some of the times but you can't fool Google for very long.

Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

Let me couch this blog by saying we're not sure this is how Facebook is going to do their search but it may be close.

Facebook is banking on the idea that people will accept the advice of their friends over that of a computer. It is their goal to turn Facebook’s 500+ million users into an internal referral source for movies, restaurants and yes…attorneys.

When you do a search on Google, you are letting an algorithm suggest information that is relevant to your query. Facebook is working on a search engine that will deliver results that your “friends” “Like”.

Business pages on Facebook have a “Like” button. Once someone clicks the “Like” button all of their “friends” in their network will be notified that they like a particular restaurant, charity or attorney. So, if one person has 200 “friends” all 200 people will be aware of your law firm. That means, every time you receive a “Like” hundreds of people will now be aware of your business. Even better, eventually, when someone searches the Facebook network for an attorney, your law firm will show up in the results if any of their “friends” is connected to you.

At Omnipresent SEO, we believe social media is going to be a big part of the future for law firms. Think 10 years back and how many law firms had websites. Nowadays, if you don’t have one people look at you strange. The same is going to happen with social media resources like Facebook.

Below are two great articles that give more insight into how big and revolutionary this type of search will be.

Omnipresent SEO Blog Posts

As we have written about before, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is creeping into the world of search. It makes perfect sense, really. A big part of Google's traditional algorithm is evaluating how many links come into a web site, and who those links are from. Think of it as peer review.

But in that scenario, the "peers" are other web sites, not people you know. Ah, but the people I know are all on my social networks. What if Google and the other search engines could know who my friends are and then cross reference what they like when giving me answers to my queries?

This isn't an entirely new product. Previously, Google announced the incorporation of similar things in the SERPS, but this takes it to a new level.

Conspicuously missing from Google's Social Search, however, is Facebook. The two companies have not been playing nice lately (Facebook has been raiding Google's best employees, and recently Google stopped allowing Facebook to access its users Gmail accounts, etc), and I assume that is a factor in all of this. But for Social Search to really have an impact, it is going to need to include Facebook eventually, and I am sure that it will. (The other scenario, which is certainly possible, is that Facebook will finally add a SEARCH feature that only shows results from your connections).

The bottom line is this: search is changing, and it is obvious that it is moving towards a much more customizable and socially based system. If your business isn't yet listed on the Social Sites, soon you might find yourself no longer listed on most people's search results either.